In this help article, you will learn how to set up a custom tracking domain for Hunter Campaigns when your domain is hosted by the registrar Namecheap.

Make sure that you have already purchased the domain through Namecheap and that you have DNS control over your domain. In this tutorial, we will follow along with the domain tryhunter.co.

To set up your own custom domain in Hunter, you will need to establish a link between Hunter and your domain. This can be done in 3 steps.

Let's go through each step in detail.

In your Hunter account, head to your Campaign settings page, in the Custom Domain section.

In the text area, you will enter a subdomain of your Namecheap domain. A subdomain is an extension in front of your domain. You can choose to add any word in front of your domain, such as track, tracking, etc. In this case, we've chosen to go with the subdomain track.tryhunter.co.

Click on "Set this custom domain".

Next, Hunter will generate a validation key. This can take a couple minutes – it took 3 minutes when creating this guide. Feel free to leave the page if needed.

Once the key is generated, you will find the instructions for the next step: using the key to validate that you own the subdomain.

Log in to your Namecheap account. Head to your Domain List section and click on "Manage" next to your domain.

Click on "Advanced DNS", and in the "Host Records" section, click on "Add new record":

This is where you will copy and paste the name and value of the key generated by Hunter:

Lastly, save the changes. You will then have to wait until Hunter can retrieve the updated value from your provider, which should take less than 5 minutes.

Once the ownership of the domain has been verified, you will see the last instructions that are needed so that Hunter can track Campaign emails using your domain.

In your Namecheap account, on the same page where you created the TXT record (see above for instructions), you will need to either update this record, or simply create a new record.

Save the changes, and wait until the information is updated in Hunter.

Once the custom tracking domain has been set up, you can increase the TTL value of your CNAME record. When you are setting up the domain, you want a short TTL so that the information is updated as soon as possible, but after the initial set up, a higher TTL should make your domain faster, as clients will cache the IP addresses associated with it for a longer period of time. You can for instance set it to 20 minutes.

Once you've activated custom tracking domain, any links inserted in your campaigns will use your own domain rather than one of Hunter's domains to track their performance. This will include links used to track if a recipient opens your emails, the various links that you insert in your emails, and the unsubscribe link.